“You remember that? After eleven years?”
“No. I keep a case diary. I looked it up.”
“Mobile phone, maybe?”
“No. I called him at the ranch. Elisa didn’t remember the license number on the Land-Rover. I called him about the middle of the morning and he gave me the number. Then I called him again in the afternoon to make sure Breedlove hadn’t checked in. And to find out if he’d had any other calls. Anything worthwhile.”
“Well, hell,” Chee said. “Then I guess we’re left with Breedlove climbing up there alone, or with Shaw, and then taking the suicidal shortcut down.”
Leaphorn’s expression suggested he didn’t agree with that conclusion, but he didn’t comment on it directly.
“It also means I’m going to have to run down all these people who climbed up there in the next ten years and find out if any of them got off with a long piece of that climbing rope.”
“Not necessarily,” Leaphorn said. “You’re forgetting our Fallen Man business is still not a crime. It’s a missing person case solved by the discovery of an accidental death.”
“Yeah,” Chee said, doubtful.
“It makes me glad I’m a civilian these days.”
The wind gusted, rattling sand against the aluminum side of Chee’s home, whistling around its aluminum cracks and corners.
“So does the weather,” Leaphorn said. “Everybody in uniform is going to be working overtime and getting frostbite this week.”
Chee pointed to Leaphorn’s plate. “Want some more?”
“I’m full. Probably ate too much. And I took too much of your time.” He got up, retrieved his hat.
“I’m going to leave you these pictures,” he said. “Rosebrough has the negatives. He’s a lawyer. An agent of the court. They’ll stand up as evidence if it comes to that.”
“You mean if anyone gets up there and steals the ledger?”
“It’s a thought,” Leaphorn said. “What are you going to do tomorrow?”
Chee had worked for Leaphorn long enough for this question to produce a familiar uneasy feeling. “Why?”
“If I go up to the ranch tomorrow and show Demott and Elisa these pictures and ask her what she thinks about them, and ask her who was trying to climb that mountain on that September eighteenth date, then I think I could be accused of tampering with a witness.”
“Witness to what? Officially there’s no crime yet,” Chee reminded him.
“Don’t you think there will be one? Presuming we’re smart enough to get this sorted out.”
“You mean not counting Maryboy and me? Yeah. I guess so. But you could probably get away with talking to Elisa until the official connection is made. Now you’re just a representative of the family lawyer. Perfectly legit.”
“But why would Demott or the widow want to talk to a representative of the family’s lawyer?”
Chee nodded, conceding the point.
“And I think there’s something else I should be doing.”
Chee let his stare ask the question.
“Old Amos Nez trusts me,” Leaphorn said, and paused to consider it. “Well, more or less. I want to show him this evidence that Hal climbed Ship Rock just one week after he left the canyon and tell him about Maryboy being murdered, and ask him if Hal said anything about trying to climb Ship Rock just before he came to the canyon. Things like that.”
“That could wait,” Chee said, thinking of his aching ribs and the long painful drive up into Colorado.
“Maybe it could wait,” Leaphorn said. “But you know the other afternoon you decided Hosteen Maryboy couldn’t wait and you rushed right out there to see if he could identify those climbers for you. And you were right. Turned out it couldn’t wait.”
“Ah,” Chee said. “But I’m not clear on what makes Amos Nez so important. You think Breedlove might have told him something?”
“Let’s try another theory,” Leaphorn said. “Let’s say that Hal Breedlove didn’t live until his thirtieth birthday. Let’s say those people Hosteen Sam saw climbing on September eighteenth got to the top, or at least two of them did. One of the two was Hal. The other one—or maybe two—push him off. Or, more likely he just falls. Now he’s dead and he’s dead two days too soon. He’s still twenty-nine years old. So the climber’s register is falsified to show he was alive after his birthday.”
Chee held up his hand, grinning. “Huge hole in that one,” he said. “Remember Hal was prowling around the canyon with his wife and Amos Nez until the twenty-third of . . . “ Chee’s voice trailed off into silence. And then he said, “Oh!” and stared at Leaphorn.
Leaphorn was making a wry face, shaking his head. “It sure took me long enough to see that possibility,” he said. “I never could have if you hadn’t got into old man Sam’s register.”
“My God,” Chee said. “If that’s the way it worked, I can see why they have to kill Nez. And if they’re smart, the sooner the better.”
“I’m going to ask you to call the Lazy B and find out if Demott and the widow are there and then arrange to drive up tomorrow and talk to them about what we found on top of the mountain.”
“What if they’re not at home?”
“Then I think we ought to be doing a little more to keep Amos Nez safe,” Leaphorn said. And he opened the door and stepped out into the icy wind.
ELISA BREEDLOVE HAD ANSWERED the telephone. And, yes, Eldon was home and they’d be glad to talk to him. How about sometime tomorrow afternoon?
So Acting Lieutenant Chee showed up at his office in Shiprock early to get his desk cleared and make the needed arrangements. He arrived with tape plastered over the stitches around his left eye and a noticeable shiner visible behind them. He lowered himself carefully into the chair behind the desk to avoid jarring his ribs and gave Officers Teddy Begayaye, Deejay Hondo, Edison Bai, and Bernadette Manuelito a few moments to inspect the damage. In Begayaye and Bai it seemed to provoke a mixture of admiration and amusement, well suppressed. Hondo didn’t seem interested and Officer Bernie Manuelito’s face reflected a sort of shocked sympathy.
With that out of the way, he satisfied their curiosity with a personal briefing of what actually happened at the Maryboy place, supplementing the official one they would have already received. Then down to business.
He instructed Bai to try to find out where a .38-caliber pistol confiscated from a Shiprock High School boy had come from. He suggested to Officer Manuelito that she continue her efforts to locate a fellow named Adolph Deer, who had jumped bond after a robbery conviction but was reportedly “frequently being seen around the Two Gray Hills trading post.” He told Hondo to finish the paperwork on a burglary case that was about to go to the grand jury. Then it was Teddy Begayaye’s turn.
“I hate to tell you, Teddy, but you’re going to have to be taxi driver today,” Chee said. “I have to go up to the Lazy B ranch on this Maryboy shooting thing. I thought I could handle it myself, but”—he lifted his left arm, flinched, and grimaced—“the old ribs aren’t quite as good as I thought they were.”
“You shouldn’t be riding around in a car,” Officer Manuelito said. “You should be in bed, healing up. They shouldn’t have let you out of the hospital.”
“Hospitals are dangerous,” Chee said. “People die in them.”
Edison Bai grinned at that, but Officer Manuelito didn’t think it was funny.
“Something goes wrong with broken ribs and you have a punctured lung,” she said.
“They’re just cracked,” Chee said. “Just a bruise.” With that subject closed, he kept Bai behind for a fill-in about the pistol-carrying student. Typically, Bai provided far more details than Chee needed. The boy had been involved in a joyride car theft during the summer. He was born to the Streams Come Together people, his mother’s clan, and for the Salt clan, for his paternal people, but his father was also part Hopi. He was believed to be involved in the smaller and rougher of Shiprock’s juvenile gangs. He was meanness on the hoof. People weren’
t raising their kids the way they used to. Chee agreed, put on his hat and hurried stiffly out the door into the parking lot. It had been chilly and clouding up when he came to work. Now there was solid overcast and an icy northwest wind swept dust and leaves past his ankles.
The gale was blowing Begayaye back toward him.
“Jim,” he said. “I forgot. The wife made a dental appointment for me today. How about me switching assignments with Bernie? That Deer kid isn’t going anywhere.”
“Well,” Chee said. Across the parking lot he saw Bernie Manuelito standing on the sheltered side of his patrol car, watching them. “Is it okay with Manuelito?”
“Yes, sir,” Begayaye said. “She don’t mind.”
“By the way,” Chee said, “I forgot to thank you guys for sending me those flowers.”
Begayaye looked puzzled. “Flowers? What flowers?”
Thus it was that Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee headed north toward the Colorado border leaning his good shoulder against the passenger-side door with Officer Bernadette Manuelito behind the wheel. Chee, being a detective, had figured out who had sent him the flowers. Begayaye hadn’t done it, and Bai would never think of doing such a thing even if he was fond of Chee—which Chee was pretty sure he wasn’t. That left Deejay Hondo and Bernie. Which clearly meant Bernie had sent them and made it look like everybody did it so he wouldn’t think she was buttering him up. That probably meant she liked him. Thinking back, he could remember a couple of other signs that pointed to that conclusion.
All things considered, he liked her, too. She was really smart, she was sweet to everybody around the office, and she was always using her days off to take care of an apparently inexhaustible supply of ailing and indigent kinfolks, which gave her a high score on the Navajo value scale. When the time came he would have to give her a good efficiency rating. He gave her a sidewise glance, saw her staring unblinkingly through the windshield at the worn pavement of infamous U.S. Highway 666. A very slight smile curved the corner of her lip, making her look happy, as she usually was. No doubt about it, she really was an awfully pretty young woman.
That wasn’t the way he should be thinking about Officer Bernadette Manuelito. Not only was he her superior officer and supervisor, he was more or less engaged to marry another woman. And he was thinking that way, most likely, because he was having a very confusing problem with that other woman. He was beginning to suspect that she didn’t really want to marry him. Or, at least, he wasn’t sure she was willing to marry Jim Chee as he currently existed—a just-plain cop and a genuine sheep-camp Navajo as opposed to the more romantic and politically correct Indigenous Person. Making it worse, he didn’t know what the hell to do about it. Or whether he should do anything. It was a sad, sad situation.
Chee sighed, decided the ribs would feel better if he shifted his weight. He did it, sucked in his breath, and grimaced.
“You all right?” Bernie asked, giving him a worried look.
“Okay,” Chee said.
“I have some aspirin in my stuff.”
“No problem,” Chee said.
Bernie drove in silence for a while.
“Lieutenant,” she said. “Do you remember telling us how Lieutenant Leaphorn was always trying to get you to look for patterns? I mean when you had something going on that was hard to figure out.”
“Yeah,” Chee said.
“And that’s what you wanted me to try to find in this cattle-stealing business?”
Chee grunted, trying to remember if he had made any such suggestion.
“Well, I got Lucy Sam to let me take that ledger to that Quik-Copy place in Farmington and I got copies made of the pages back for several years so I’d have them. And then I went through our complaint records and copied down the dates of all the cattle-theft reports for the same years.”
“Good Lord,” Chee said, visualizing the time that would take. “Who was doing your regular work for you?”
“Just the multiple-head thefts,” Officer Manuelito said, defensively. “The ones which look sort of professional. And I did it in the evenings.”
“Oh,” Chee said, embarrassed.
“Anyway, I started comparing the dates. You know, when Mr. Sam would write down something about a certain sort of truck, and when there would be a cattle theft reported in our part of the reservation.”
Officer Manuelito had been reciting this very carefully, as if she had rehearsed it. Now she stopped.
“What’d you notice?”
She produced a deprecatory laugh. “I think this is probably really silly,” she said.
“I doubt it,” Chee said, thinking he would like to get his mind off of Janet Pete and quit trying to find a way to turn back the clock and make things the way they used to be. “Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me about it.”
“There was a correlation between multiple-theft reports and Mr. Sam seeing a big banged-up dirty white camper truck in the neighborhood,” Manuelito said, looking fixedly at the highway center stripe. “Not all the time,” she added. “But often enough so it made you begin to wonder about it.”
Chee digested this. “The trailer like Mr. Finch’s rig?” he said. “The New Mexico brand inspector’s camper?”
“Yes, sir.” She laughed again. “I said it was probably silly.”
“Well, I guess our theft reports would be passed along to him. Then he’d come out here to see about it.”
Officer Manuelito kept her eyes on the road, her lips opened as if she were about to say something. But she didn’t. She simply looked disappointed.
“Wait a minute,” Chee said, as understanding belatedly dawned. “Was Hosteen Sam seeing Finch’s trailer after the thefts were reported? Or—”
“Usually before,” Bernie said. “Sometimes both, but usually before. But you know how that is. Sometimes the cattle are gone for a while before the owner notices they’re missing.”
Bernie drove, looking very tense. Chee digested what she’d told him. Suddenly he slammed his right hand against his leg. “How about that?” he said. “That wily old devil.”
Officer Manuelito relaxed, grinned. “You think so? You think that might be right?”
“I’d bet on it,” Chee said. “He’d have everything going for him. All the proper legal forms for moving cattle. All the brand information. All the reasons for being where the cattle are. And all cops would know him as one of them. Perfect.”
Bernie was grinning even wider, delighted. “Yes,” she said. “That’s sort of what I was thinking.”
“Now we need to find out how he markets them. And how he gets them from the pasture to the feedlots.”
“I think it’s in the trailer,” Bernie said.
“The trailer? You mean he hauls cattle in his house trailer?”
Chee’s incredulous tone caused Bernie to flush slightly. “I think so,” she said. “I couldn’t prove it.”
A few moments ago Acting Lieutenant Chee might have scoffed at this remarkable idea. But not now. “Tell me,” he said. “How does he get them through the door?”
“It took me a long time to get the idea,” she said. “I think it was noticing that now and then I’d see that trailer parked at the Anasazi Inn at Farmington, and I’d think it was funny that you’d drive that big clumsy camper trailer around if you didn’t want to sleep in it. I thought, you know, well, maybe he just wants a hot bath, or something like that. But it stuck in my mind.”
She laughed. “I’m always trying to understand white people.”
“Yeah,” Chee said. “Me too.”
“So the other day when he parked the trailer in the lot at the station, when I walked past it I noticed how it smelled.”
“A little whiff of cow manure,” said Chee, who had walked behind it, too. “I just thought, you know, he’s around feedlots all the time. Stepping in the stuff. Probably gets used to it. Doesn’t clean his boots.”
“That occurred to me, too,” Bernie said. “But it was pretty strong. Maybe women are more s
ensitive to smells.”
Or smarter, Chee thought. “Did you look inside?”
“He’s got all the windows all stuck full of those tourist stickers, and they’re high windows. I tried to take a peek but I didn’t want him to see me snooping.”
“I guess we could get a search warrant,” Chee said. “What would you put on the petition? Something about the brand inspector’s camper smelling like cow manure, to which the judge would say ‘Naturally,’ and about Finch not liking to sleep in it, which would cause the judge to say ‘Not if it smells like cow manure.’”
“I thought about the search warrant,” Bernie said. “Of course there’s no law against hauling cows in your camper if you want to.”
“True,” Chee said. “Might be able to get him committed for being crazy.”
“Anyway,” Bernie said. “I called his office and I—”
“You what!”
“I just wanted to know where he was. If he answered I was going to hang up. If he didn’t, I’d ask ’em where I could find him. He wasn’t there, and the secretary said he’d called in from the Davis and Sons cattle-auction place over by Iyanbito. So I drove over there and his camper truck was parked by the barn and he was out in back with some people loading up steers. So I got a closer look.”
“You didn’t break in?” Chee asked, thinking she’d probably say she had. Nothing this woman did was going to surprise him anymore.
She glanced at him, looking hurt, and ignored the question.
“Maybe you noticed that camper has just a straight-up flat back. There’s no door in it and no window. Well, all around that back panel it’s sealed up with silvery duct tape. Like you’d maybe put on to keep the dust out. But when you get down and look under you can see a row of big, heavy-duty hinges.”
Chee was into this now. “So you back your trailer up to the fence, pull off the duct tape, lower the back down, and that makes a loading ramp out of it. He probably has it rigged up with stalls to keep ’em from moving around.”
“I guessed it would handle about six,” Bernie said. “Two rows of cows, three abreast.”
The Fallen Man Page 18